Not PC

. . . promoting capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Popular NOT PC so far this year

After a long, hot, relaxed summer holiday, a long, slow start back would be ideal. If only. And to make matters worse, my first full week back blogging also turned out to be Obama Week. Phew. At least the visit of the legendary Mr Cohen last night made things delightfully better.

Anyway, here’s what you, dear readers, seemed to like most out of what was posted here at NOT PC since Christmas:

Kerfuffle in a falafel food hallWho would have thought that the biggest local story of the year so far was the bigotry of an Invercargill falafel shop owner, or that the most popular post of the year so far would be one defending his right to be a bigot on his own property – or that so few readers would apparently understand the difference between persuasion and force.

Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)"I will not make any deals with you,” he declared in his most famous role. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own." Sadly, his life is now no longer. Farewell Patrick.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Hail to the Chief!On the eve of this week’s coronation of the Obamessiah, Doc McGrath watches a movie about a populist demagogue who promises job creation, public works redistribution of wealth and redemption for everyone except the wealthy. And waddya know, it’s not about the Messiah …

Not PJ: Pharmacy Floppy Flip FlopIt’s time for a change. Change we can be flabbergasted at. And when the Ministry of Health does change, says Bernard Darnton, it really is something to be flabbergasted about.

First-of-the-New-Year RambleA bunch o’ links y’all seemed to like to what appeared around the traps while I was away sunning myself in the Bay of Plenty.

NOT PJ: Smoke and MRIsBernard Darnton scientifically calculates the amount of bullshit in the newspaper -- and finds it’s increased by 76.29% since records began!

Not a bad haul for a slow January, I think you’ll have to admit. And the good folk at the Objectivism O-Bloggers network have been busy too. Okay, busier. Check out this week’s O-Bloggers’ round-up for lots more good stuff.

Beer O’Clock: Behold, the widget!

The beer find of the summer was not a summer beer. In fact it wasn’t even a new beer, and it certainly wasn’t local.

It was Guinness.

From a bottle.

Anyone who’s ever drunk a draught Guinness in Europe can tell you it sure shits all over the local draught product – and if you’ve ever drunk a draught Guinness in Dublin, you’ll know that it’s about the best Guinness you can get. And the best Guinness you can get is something very, very good indeed. If the sight of those glasses lined up at Temple Bar doesn’t make you salivate, then know that there’s something very important in your life that you haven’t done yet, and need to.

Sadly however, it seems that the further you get from the shores of the Liffey, the worse the Guinness gets.

Guinness, it’s said, just doesn’t travel well. And it’s said that the problem with the local product in particular is that the water here in Enzed is too clean, but who knows. Whatever the reason, local Guinness lovers have until now either drunk draught Murphy’s, which tastes as good here as it does in Cork; or they’ve tried to endure the imported cans or bottles, which have their own problems; or even the locally brewed substitute, which at a pinch (on St Paddy’s Day for example) just has to do.

Still, none of these have been ideal.

Murphy’s is a fine drop, but sure and it’s still not Guinness.

And sure, the Guinness cans and bottles did come from Dublin, but without a widget the bottles didn’t pour draught, and while the widget in the cans (which is a nitrogen-filled ping pong ball with a hymen that ruptured when the can opened) certainly works well for Kilkenny, it was never really satisfactory to bring out all the colour of its more beautiful darker sister.

What’s changed is a new widget in a new Guinness bottle – a “rocket widget” that comes with promises you can even drink straight from the bottle and still get the full Guinness hit, a promise that certainly delivers the goods when you pour it into a glass and drink it as you should.

The widget promise is no idle promise. What it pours is nectar.

There were some glorious days over the last summer when myself and my companions were getting to know these dark, well-chilled lovelies a little better, days when you could almost close your eyes and think you were in Dublin – if that is there weren’t the sounds of summer and it weren’t about twenty degrees warmer.

And as it happened this dark beer born in a brewery by the Liffey proved, with its new rocket widget, to accompany the sounds of a New Zealand summer extraordinarily well. And it has the added advantage of being on sale in most every bottle store in the country (and in the Dargaville Woolworths at least it’s on special at the bargain bottle price of just $14.99 for a six-pack).

I commend it to your well-deserved attention.

Cheers, PC

* * Check back in next week when your two regular beer correspondents Stu and Neil will return in this regular Friday slot to keep your thirst quenched and you taste buds tapping. * *

Bush: Five out of ten.

You don’t have to agree with everything George W. Bush ever did to agree with Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, that Bush did get it right more often than his detractors would like to admit.

Of the points Karl Rove mentions, I give Bush five out of ten – although since this is Karl Rove who’s making the points, we have to give due allowance for the spin, and for the fact that his own place in history is tied inexorably to his former boss’s. So there is no way in hell, for example, you can ever accuse Bush II of exercising spending restraint. Where was Rove when this was happening, huh?

FAQ: Can fiscal stimulus save us?

Q:Why’s that? A: Because the fundamental problem is not lack of money to shore up demand, but lack of goods to pay for real demand –- that is, lack of the sort of goods that are being demanded -- and no amount of “stimulus” can fix that. All it can do is make the production of those goods more difficult.

Read Can Fiscal Stimulus Revive the US Economy? for the details. As Frank Shostak points out there, “not only does the increase in government outlays not raise overall output by a positive multiple; but, on the contrary, this leads to the weakening in the process of wealth generation in general.”

This is the case not just for the US, but for anyone who tries the same “stimulus” shenanigans. Can someone please explain all this to Little Billy English, the Pink Tory Pump-Primer.

UPDATE: Further on Shostak's point quoted above, Economist Robert Barro (highly rated by the likes of Richard Salsman) points out that the idea of a positive mutiplier from government spending (i.e., the result predicted by the simple Keynesian macroeconomic model) "implicitly assumes that the government is better than the private market at marshaling idle resources to produce useful stuff. Unemployed labor and capital can be utilized at essentially zero social cost, but the private market is somehow unable to figure any of this out. In other words, there is something wrong with the price system."

In other words, any notion of a positive multiple is mistaken. As Barro argues,

"A much more plausible starting point is a multiplier of zero. In this case, the GDP is given, and a rise in government purchases requires an equal fall in the total of other parts of GDP -- consumption, investment and net exports. In other words, the social cost of one unit of additional government purchases is one."

Barackistas’ bilge

How do Obamafiles think they’re going to save the planet, fix the economy, or even sort out their own damn neighbourhoods, when they can’t even clean up after themselves. Check out the post-Barakalyptic wasteland in the Washington Mall after the Barackistas headed home, leaving their detritus behind them.

It’s not a pretty sight. They have seen the enemy, and it really is themselves.

Even the Obamessiah can’t kill old hatreds

I’m interested in the strong parallels between two apparently unrelated events: the shutting down of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and the birth of Israel.

What’s the common factor? Let me explain.

For years, countries opposed to America’s war against Islamic totalitarianism used the prisoners of war at Guantanamo (which is what they are) as a metaphorical club with which to beat up ‘imperialistic America.’ Yet now the anti-Americans are offered those same captives as a means by which to shut down the facility, they’re all suddenly finding they’ve got more important plans for the weekend – that there’s no room at their particular European inns.

This is hypocrisy is of a kind that only European politicians looking down their patrician noses can pull off. Yet it’s the same sort of hypocrisy that explains why Palestinians have been largely homeless for the last sixty years.

You see, when Britain and the US promised the same bit of land to three different bunches of people after the last world war, the UN resolved the problem they’d created by partitioning Palestine into one home for the Jews who’d fled there after Hitler’s holocaust, and another for the Palestinians they’d partly supplanted -– and the Arab countries who surrounded Israel (the new name given to the new, tiny and seemingly defenceless Jewish homeland) figured this was their opportunity to incite the Palestinians into perpetrating their own portion of the holocaust, and helped them to try to drive the dirty Jews into the sea.

When they failed spectacularly –- as they have done every time they’ve tried -– the Palestinians found that all the Arab doors in the area were closed to them. They discovered they were merely the spent refuse of Arab hatred who’d now been used up, and were no longer needed -– except as a means by which to keep the simmering anti-Semitism going.

So just as the Arabs need hundreds of thousands of homeless Palestinians to maintain their violent anti-Seminism, so too do the Europeans need hundreds of Guantanamo captives to keep their nasty anti-Americanism alive. The last thing they want is to have the spent refuse of their own irrational hatreds delivered to their door step.

Much easier just to keep on hating.

Old hatreds die hard, you see, even in the new world washed clean by the Obamessiah.

These two books only make nine and ten on Gibson’s list. At three, for some reason only Gibson could explain, is a green paean by NY Times neocon Thomas Friedman – an anti-consumerist tract called Hot, Flat and Crowded -- a synthesis of the worst of neo-conservatism and green Gaia worship by a writer the Financial Times labels a “zeitgeist thermometer” (“even Friedman, one of the original cheerleaders for the spread of liberal, western democracy, is having authoritarian day-dreams” says the FT, apparently unaware that the neocon’s support for liberal, western democracy is only a thin veneer over their actual authoritarianism) and who the NY Press calls more colourfully a “porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.” In other words, an idiot with an M.O. not dissimilar to Al Gore.

Many people [says Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi in his review in the Press] have rightly seen this new greenish pseudo-progressive tract as an ideological departure from Friedman’s previous works... Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, it’s the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes. Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

a grand unifying theory for combating existential threats. The left worries about global warming and 14 inches of sea level rise extinguishing modern civilization and the right to choose. Neocons worry about evil Muslims lurking behind the bushes ready to set off one of their millions of dirty bombs in suburban malls… Friedman has a solution to both, which he calls Code Green. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, he suggests that by the one simple, affordable step of, err, completely re-engineering the way we power America, we will stop global warming, destroy Islamic fundamentalism, and reinvigorate America’s position in the world at a stroke. Oh, and he can completely reform China too. This is, in short, the biggest conflation of wishful thinking, confused priorities, and megalomania that I have ever seen.

Friedman’s brand of Green scaremongering no doubt appeals intensely to the inner authoritarian as well as to the wistful Military-Keynesian*, but I’d thought much better of Gibson.

So by all means take the rest of NBR’s book list seriously (though if you want to understand the causes of the crash of 1929 and everything that was done to deepen the depression thereafter Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression might be a better read than his recommendation) but don’t waste your money on Friedman’s book-length baloney.

UPDATE: "Zeitgeist thermometer" he may have been, but as the global economy collapses the born-again Gaian zeitgeist might just be moving under Mr Friedman. Victor Davis Hanson for example says:

I'm very puzzled by the nexus between the current downturn and concern about global warming. Given that we were told we had to immediately cut back on carbon emissions (even before sustainable alternative energies are in place), largely by curbing our lavish energy-dependent lifestyles, why then all the concern about stimuli and global depression? Surely, the world right now is sort of what the radical Gorists wanted to see, since the current cutback in gasoline usage, and general economic slowdown are radically restricting the burning of fossil fuels in a manner that even the most optimistic green utopian could hardly have envisioned just few years ago? In other words, in the booming 2004-6 years, radical suggested scale-backs would have probably led to something akin to what we are experiencing now? So why the gloom instead of headlines blaring—"The Planet Continues to Green—as Archaic Consumption Practices Erode Further!"

Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend—the political equivalent of the pet rock?

Now that the counterfeiters have inadvertently done to the global economy what the likes of Ralph Nader and Russel Norman wanted the politicians to do on purpose, it'd sure be nice to think so, wouldn't it?

NOT PJ: Smoke and MRIs

This week in his regular column, Bernard Darnton has scientifically calculated the amount of bullshit in the newspaper -- and finds it’s increased by 76.29% since records began!

EVERY MORNING I ASK MYSELF how much crap there is in the newspaper.

Readers of yesterday’s Press and Dominion Post were greeted with a Clockwork Orange image from a cigarette package to illustrate a Ministry of Health press release dressed up as reporting. The headline said, “Warnings credited with smoking fall,” which was good sense on the part of the newspaper because it left the logical fallacy in the hands of the author of the press release rather than in those of the newspaper that was regurgitating it.

National Director of Tobacco Control – a job title that no doubt comes with a spiffing uniform – Ashley Bloomfield was noting that a “dramatic drop” in smoking rates has occurred since the introduction of compulsory gory photographs on cigarette packets.

The idea that because one event follows another the relationship must be causal is known to philosophers as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. That’s Latin for “we just make this shit up.”

Bloomfield admits that it’s “hard to attribute specific drops … to specific interventions” but is confident, even without evidence, that the gory photographs are effective. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a branch of the Ministry of Health, agrees with the Ministry of Health. They apparently have “anecdotal evidence” that the new warnings work.

I have anecdotal evidence that people think the warnings are a joke. I know a single male in his forties who regards children the way most people regard termites, who always asks for the “Smoking may harm your baby” packs. More tobacco-advertising-related wishful thinking.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a huge increase in smoking amongst teenage boys – just so they can get the warning labels. “I’ll swap you a clogged artery and a gangrenous toe for the eye operation and the bleeding brain.” Kewwwl.

Given the Ministry’s statistics, the warnings may well have increased smoking; we just don’t know. Jamie Whyte, author of Crimes Against Logic, calls statistics “the chemical weapons of persuasion.” “Just release a few statistics into the discussion and the effects will soon be visible within moments: eyes glaze over, jaws slacken, and soon everyone will be nodding in agreement.”

Dr Bloomfield isn’t so much nodding in agreement as babbling in confusion. The same man who noted the “dramatic drop” in smoking over the last two years also notes, in a part of the press release not copied into the newspaper, that the drop in adult smoking, from 24.3% to 23.9%, is “not statistically significant”. I.e. it may not even be a drop – it may be so small it’s just a measurement error.

Indeed, if some recent research proves valid he should be exhibiting another symptom of chemical weapons poisoning: namely, crapping himself. Recent brain imaging research has suggested that seeing the warnings stimulates the desire to smoke rather than puts people off, presumably because the emotional brain lights up in desire for more nicotine far faster than the rational brain plods to the conclusion that it’s a bad idea because you might get a gammy toe in a few decades.

The brain imaging research is new and has plenty of critics but at least doing an experiment is a better approach than wishful thinking. Assuming that whatever you do is brilliant and guaranteed to work isn’t what scientists call “scientific”.

The hard science of cause and effect is slowly creeping into territory currently occupied by the social “science” of coincidence and reportage. The question is not how much crap is there in the newspaper, but when will they finally get too embarrassed to print it?

Wright himself said that the Schwartz House was "a house designed for utility and fecund living....in which there is no predominating feature, but in which the entire is so coordinated as to achieve a thing of beauty."

Check out this neat photo of current owners Michael Ditmer & Lisa Proeche with Wright apprentice Edgar Tafel, who supervised construction of the house around 1939, and an interview here with Michael and Lisa.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Two sentences that sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict

If two sentences could sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict, it would be these from Thomas Sowell:

"Since everybody seems to be criticizing Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land.... Those who think 'negotiations' are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an 'issue' that can be resolved amicably around a conference table."

NEW BLOG: Heroes of Capitalism

On a day when near everyone you encounter seems to think that politicians can save the world, it gives me great pleasure to recommend to you a newish blog promoting the Heroes of Capitalism, which each day features a businessman whose work improved our lives, and theirs – the people, in other words, who really do move the world.

Rhetoric, hope, hysteria … [updated]

Take away the hope, the expectation, the wall to wall and coast-to-coast hysteria (from sea to shining sea) ... on substance I heard just this: Sacrifice, Duty, Responsibility to Others.

Did you hear that too?

He didn't actually say "Ask not what you can do for your country, ask only what your government can do for you" -- he didn't say those actual words, but that was the text at the top of his page.

He didn’t actually say “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” but every sign says that Roosevelt’s incantation and that same idea that he could talk the world out of disaster in the same disastrous way were in the back of his mind.

This is the Year of the Depression. It will take more than fine words to fix it, and on substance we heard only this: rhetoric with only one message: Give Up, Do What You're Told, Don't Be Selfish.

And if anyone thinks that is going to fix what ails the American economy, or bring hope, or rescue the American Dream (or protect the goddamn Constitution, which is what the Oath of Office required him to promise)... then I have a bridge to nowhere I can sell them.

UPDATE: Over the day I’ll be adding comments from some of the people I like offering some of what they think:

Myrhaf: “Ever notice how Barack and Michelle Obama love telling the American people how much they will have to work? In a free country a president does not tell people they must work hard. In a free country a president does not lecture people on their responsibilities… Barack Obama assumes power over a nation that he loves to remind us is suffering a dire crisis. He fails to understand that the crisis is due to massive intervention in the economy by the state. His solution to the crisis is much more massive intervention in the economy. Obama speaks grimly of the work we must do and the responsibilities we must bear because he hopes Americans will sacrifice for the collective good. It is his only conception of how to deal with the crisis: lead the collective in sacrifice.”

Edward Cline: “What do pirates, outgoing president George W. Bush, president-elect Barack Obama, and Congress all have in common? President-elect Obama, when he takes the oath of office on January 20th, will swear to protect the United States and uphold the Constitution. But as he made clear throughout his campaign, and has made clear in a number of television interviews and at press conferences since winning the election, he promises to do no such thing. Instead, he has promised to continue the federal government’s policy of “saving” the country by looting the productive private sector of wealth and manpower in a program that will make his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, look like a rank amateur. He will, with Congress’s help, add over a trillion dollars to the over trillion dollars rung up by the Bush administration. Hypothetically, this represents a mortgage on the lives of two or three unborn generations. Hypothetically, because the economy and the country will collapse long before our elective oligarchy and its bureaucratic minions present impoverished Americans with the tax bill.”

Ari Armstrong: “I disliked quite a lot about Rick Warren's prayer at Barack Obama's inauguration. But he did have one excellent line, that we are united not by race and not by religion, but by our commitment to freedom. To the degree that the religious right -- and the religious left -- takes that insight seriously, we can all get along fine in the political arena.”

Edward Cline again: “Watching news media coverage of Barack Obama’s journey to the White House was much like watching the broadcast propaganda of a dystopian fantasy in films like V, or the Richard Burton’s1984, or Fahrenheit 451 -- except that the news media is not a vast government department spewing out lies and disinformation, haranguing and brow-beating the public, but a nominally independent entity reporting Obama’s triumph with deliriously mindless happy talk… Having written extensively on America’s Revolutionary period in fiction and nonfiction, I took special and personal offense to Obama’s Philadelphia speech on January 17th, in which he appropriated the Revolution without once mentioning the ideas that made it possible. In that speech, he turned those unnamed ideas inside out, pronouncing the words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but meaning entirely different things by them. Your “life,” he said or implied, is not entirely your own, but your neighbor’s or the nation’s; your “liberty,” he suggested, exists as long it is regulated if not otherwise prohibited; your “pursuit of happiness,” he insisted, is possible but not before you serve and sacrifice for the good and happiness of all. Lest it be thought that I am putting words into his mouth or twisting his meaning, read the transcripts of all of Obama’s campaign and acceptance speeches, and it will be seen that he is no friend of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness -- qua individual rights. Obama’s speeches have always been a broth of rhetorical ambiguities and populist language addressed to the worst in men, concealing an intention to rule, to decree, to govern like a prince with the unqualified leave of his subjects. Obama’s admirers and supporters constitute a people who do not want to be free, and who do not want anyone else to be free. Allowing their emotions to govern their minimal thought and their actions, they have endorsed his notion that everyone must be tied in servitude and sacrifice to everyone else to “work together” for a “more perfect union.”

Lindsay Perigo: “President Barack Obama's inaugural address offered some grounds for cautious reassurance… The scary semi-Marxist and terrorist-appeaser of the campaign trail was barely to be glimpsed. A more mature Obama, clearly sobered by his daily reality-briefings and his reported reading of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, extolled 'the ideals of our forebears.' The candidate who had once said the Constitution should be overturned to allow for un-American 'positive rights' became the President who spoke of 'remaining true to our founding documents' … He became perhaps the first President to acknowledge that freedom of religion also means freedom from religion for those who so choose, as he listed 'non-believers' among those who make up the diversity of belief systems in America… Above all we must remember that he remains in thrall to the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the very antithesis of the founding ideals of which he spoke so glowingly. Until America has a President who understands and upholds a person's right to live for his own sake, liberty-lovers can never sit back and relax. It is to be hoped that President Obama will continue his study of Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith ... and even more crucially, that he will add Ayn Rand to his reading list."

Glenn Reynolds: “It was a big deal when JFK became the first Catholic President, but now it seems quaint that that was ever an issue. It will be nice to see the same thing come true regarding the first black President.” [Hat tip Tim Blair].

Michael C. Moynihan at Hit & Run: "To Theodor Adorno, the writing of poetry after Auschwitz was barbarism. After 9/11, Graydon Carter, former editor of Spy magazine, declared an end to "the age of irony." As of noon today, after the inauguration of President Barack Obama—the "world's inauguration," according to the awful David Gergen—we have apparently entered the post-political humor era. Because there ain't nothing funny about Hope and Change."

Tibor Machan: "The man looks like he walked off the cover of GQ but, as withmany who adorn the covers of that and other magazines featuring beautifulpeople, there is no evidence of any in depth political wisdom coming fromhim. All that talk about change was bunk--no change of any importance islikely to come from the Obama administration apart from what is expectedfrom any liberal democratic presidency. And that kind of change I findnothing but repugnant--a nostalgic throwback to the New Deal, for example,and an open embrace of the idea of wealth redistribution."

The crowning of the Messiah

Some humour on Coronation Day from ToThePoint News…

Q: Why are there so few real Barack Obama jokes? A: Most of them are true stories. *** Q. Why won't Obama laugh at himself? A. Because it would be racist. *** Q. Candidate Obama told us, "Yes We Can." What will President Obama tell us? A. "Yes You Will." *** Q. Why is the Secret Service doubling security on Michelle Obama immediately after the inauguration? A. If something happened to her, then Barack would be in charge. *** Have you ever noticed how Obama thinks nothing is impossible as long as somebody else has to pay for it? *** Giving money and power to Barack Obama is like giving liquor and car keys to a teenage boy. *** Why does Barack Obama want change so bad? Because he wants every cent of it. *** The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average Obama voter. *** Q. What does the Obama Messiah say when someone sneezes? A. I bless you.

And Rush Limbaugh was asked to join together with hundreds of others in taking 400 words to express his “hopes” for the Obama presidency. I don’t need 400, he replied, I only need 4. “I hope he fails.”

Ideas You Need to Know #27: Marginal Utility

From the Ideas-You-Need-To-Know file comes this beauty. The Philosophical Mortician explains brilliantly the important economic notion of Marginal Utility, which explains among other things why diamonds are worth more than water (even though we’ll never die for lack of diamonds) and why CEOs of large companies, even bad ones, calculate their salaries by the number of zeroes at the end -- while teachers, even good ones, spend their spare time checking behind the cushions for spare coins.

History Through Art

Only a nation ignorant of its own history could buy the comparison of the empty vessel with the silver tongue that is Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln, the president who won the Civil war and signed into law the Emancipation Proclamation.

Think about taking History Through Art to put you ahead of the pack. To explore the options you have in integrating History Through Art into your history program, see Scott Powell’s Implementation and Product Tiers pages.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Stimulunatics

Sometimes even a flawed argument contains a kernel of truth – and when I say that, I don’t mean the destructive idea of government “stimulus” so beautifully pilloried above. As Bernard Hickey said in the Herald,

Governments around the world are gearing up to borrow and spend unprecedented amounts on infrastructure, tax cuts and social spending in Keynesian-style attempts to boost their flagging economies. But the question rarely asked so far is: who is going to pay for it all?

The answer, of course, is us. You and me. The money borrowed now to pay for the world’s stimulus packages will be lent by savers, or printed by central bankers, but it will eventually be paid back by us -– by taxpayers – and it will be spent by governments at the expense of real productive spending. (And at roughly 3% of GDP, NZ’s stimulus package puts us third most profligate in the world’s “stimulus” stakes, right behind Iceland and Denmark.)

This is a bill doesn’t just have to be paid later; we have to pay for it now. As Ludwig von Mises used to say, it’s the current generation that has to pay for huge deficits. The reason is that there’s only so many pre-existing resources that all that stimulus can flush out, and in the absence of the government’s stimulus their owners had other plans for them. To set them to work at the government’s behest means those resources are bid away from those other more productive uses.

Which means that, thanks to these stimulus packages, any recovery is going be delayed – and to compound the error the delay will have to be paid for.

The very first step in every “stimulus” program is for the government to go out into the market and sell bonds. When the government sells bonds, it takes money … out of the economy. Then, some time later, the government puts the money back into the economy in the form of spending or tax rebates or whatever. Later, when the data becomes available, economists are shocked, shocked to find that “consumers saved their rebates” or “business investment fell by an unexpected amount”, or “imports increased”, thus completely negating the “stimulus”. Their hopes dashed, but their belief in “stimulus” unshaken, the stimulunatics then call for more “stimulus”. The fact is that for the government to be able to sell the bonds in the first place, consumers have to save, or businesses have reduce their investments, or foreigners have to sell more in the U.S. Otherwise, where would the dollars to buy the bonds come from?

The fact is, the government has no way at all to “stimulate” demand and nothing to do it with -– all it can do is either redirect demand to unproductive areas (by bidding up the price of resources), or else stifle demand by not allowing prices to drop when they need to.

The popular notion that governments can stimulate demand is a function of the idea that the printing press is a substitute for real capital goods, and the flawed measurement of GDP which leads to the ridiculous notion that it is consumers that drive the economy. But they don’t, and as George Reisman points out the notion that they do is a relic both of the Keynesian mythology and the flawed GDP calculations, which fails for the most part to measure real productive spending (i.e., spending for subsequent sales). What the GDP calculation does instead is to artificially inflate the importance of consumer spending, (even as it denudes the productive of the money they need to be productive) leaving governments to think that sending out this money as shopping subsidies and “stimulus” packages will work.

It’s also a function of another flawed idea: the idea that (in the words of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, “Our economic system is critically dependent on the free flow of credit.” But as Peter Schiff explains, healthy economies aren’t so critically dependent on credit, only bubble economies:

In truth, not all economies run on credit… In a legitimate economy, it is not credit that fuels spending and investment, but simply income and savings. It’s too bad our Fed chairman does not understand the difference… Credit is indeed vital to an economy, but it does not constitute an economy within itself. The important thing to remember is that credit is scarce, and is limited by the stock of savings. Savings loaned to one individual is not available to be loaned to another until it is repaid. If it is never repaid, the savings are lost. Loans to consumers not only crowd out more productive loans that might have been made to business, but they have a far greater likelihood of ending in default. In addition, while business loans increase our capital stock and lead to greater productivity, loans made to consumers are merely spent, and do not create conditions that will make repayment easier. When businesses borrow to fund capital investments, the extra cash flows that result are used to repay the loans. When individuals borrow to spend, loans can only be repaid out of reduced future consumption. One of the reasons we are in such dire straits is that consumers have already borrowed and spent too much. Many did so based on the false belief that ever-appreciating real estate would ultimately provide the means to repay their debts and finance their lifestyles. Now that reality has finally set in, why should the spending spree continue? The fact that a GDP comprised of 70 percent of consumption is currently contracting should not surprise anyone. In fact, such a contraction is long overdue and the government should not do anything to interfere. In trying to perpetuate the illusion, the government wants to revive the spending spree that has led us to this disaster. But how can such actions possibly help? How will more debt improve the economy? Wouldn’t our circumstances be vastly improved if we paid off some of our debts and replenished our savings? Wouldn’t we be in better shape if instead of buying more stuff we concentrated on producing it?

Wouldn’t we be better of if governments foreswore all the “stimulus” packages, and the deficit spending used to finance them, and instead got the hell out of the say so markets can correct?

Anything else will only delay what needs to be done: to flush out the malinvestments so that genuinely productive businesses can adjust to new price levels and the new capital structure, and start producing again. That’s what real recovery looks like.

If only the stimulunatics would get out of the way so that could happen.

Unfortunately the cowardice is nationwide. In recent years New Zealand's courts have admitted TV cameras, for which our justices have patted themselves on the back for their “openness,” but at the same time they’ve more and more frequently enforced orders suppressing information about what's going on inside those courts. Justice may be being done inside our courts (though reports suggests serious doubts on that score) but we can’t see that it’s being done. We can see pictures, but we're frequently not allowed to know who's on trial, and what the evidence against them is.

Like a patronising parent protecting innocent children we’re given picture but no sound. We're being treated like children, with no justification for it.

Are we really that imature? Name suppression, evidence suppression – in recent years the media has been gagged from reporting important details that would help we the people to judge for ourselves whether justice is being done in the courts assembled in our names.

I've argued before that "It's unfortunate that our courts seem to have forgotten the crucial principle that underpins their work: that justice must not only be done must must be seen to be done. When justice is kept under wraps, all sorts of nonsense appears in the vacuum instead ... Why do the courts consider us so immature that we can't handle hearing the evidence for ourselves in media reports, instead of hearing only the nonsense that its absence has generated?"

Talking about suppression orders issued over the Emma Agnew murder back in 2007, Stephen Franks slammed this "recent fad to elevate privacy and possible embarrassment over substantive justice":

The law around pre-trial contempt of court (and sub judice) is based on the theory that the risk of biasing judges and juries outweighs freedom of speech, including open disclosure of what is known and obtainable by insiders, or those determined to find out. I am not aware of any balance of evidence to support [this] fear... Indeed the attempt to treat juries like computers, cleansed of any pre-knowledge, and sheltered by evidence exclusion rules from anything a judge patronisingly considers prejudicial, turns upside down the original justification for a jury of your peers.

When justice comes with gagging orders then justice is neither being done, nor seen to be done. It's time to urgently reconsider their popularity.

Anti Dismal more than promised

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Hail to the Chief!

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath looks at the coronation of the Messiah …

I write this on the eve of the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, having earlier this weekend watched a movie based on the life of another American politician, populist demagogue Huey Pierce Long, whose ride could have taken him, as it has with Barack Obama, all the way to the White House.

The movie, All the King’s Men, follows the rise and fall of fictional politician Willie Stark, who becomes governor of Louisiana and narrowly survives impeachment before being gunned down by a medical doctor. Huey Long was governor of Louisiana (and then its U.S. Senator), who narrowly survived impeachment in the state legislature before being gunned down by a medical doctor.

The character of Willie Stark is played by Sean Penn who, as far as I can ascertain is no relation to Robert Penn Warren, the author of the novel on which the film is based. Sean Penn is well known as a left-wing activist who has cuddled up to despots such as Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. In hindsight, Sean Penn would probably have admired much of what Huey Long stood for and achieved.

The saga of Huey Long bears fuller examination in the light of the change about to occur at the top of U.S. politics. Barack Obama is possibly the most left-leaning American president ever, and appears eager to deliver his own version of the New Deal – which was the programme of economic mismanagement perpetrated by Franklin Roosevelt that prolonged the 1930s depression, and was the cause of a second one in 1937. President-elect Obama, like Huey Long, promises job creation and redistribution of wealth. Eventually, of course, the socialist house of cards will fall over and there will be spectacular collapse. (The collapse is already underway, reflecting the failed fiscal management and profligate spending of the Bush administration and continued interference in the banking system by the Federal Reserve. )

Huey Long, like Willie Stark and Sean Penn both, was essentially socialist in outlook, even though he couldn’t see it. One of nine children, and too poor to buy text books at university despite winning a scholarship, Long started as a salesman, then went to law school for a year before passing the bar exam at age 22. Most of his legal career was spent in conflict with large businesses such as oil companies and utilities. After several years in elected roles on the Louisiana Public Service Commission, he won on the second attempt, at age 35, governership of the state. His slogan for the campaign was “Every Man A King”, and he depicted the wealthy as parasites who grabbed more than their “fair share” of the wealth pie. He is said to have replaced the traditional north-south division within Louisiana based on religion with class-based differences he could continue to exploit.

Huey Long advocated taxing and redistributing wealth and assets, without regard for how the wealth was created or who actually owned it. He proposed federal money be spent on public works programmes, education and roading, whether or not this spending was authorized in the U.S. Constitution. As governor, he ruled the state of Louisiana as a dictator, ruthlessly persecuting political opponents, often using his political influence to ensure that his enemies and their families lost their jobs and businesses.

Corruption ensured that Huey Long maintained an iron grip on power. The governor’s office continued, under his leadership, to fill vacancies in the state bureaucracy with his favoured appointees. And of course all state employees were expected to pay a tithe into Long’s political war fund.

Long’s legislative programme met some opposition from Americans who had some inkling of what their Constitution actually meant. One school attempted to block the receipt of taxpayer funded textbooks, saying they would not accept charity from the state. The governor, in turn, blocked authorization for development of an air base near the town in question until the school aceepted the books. When things were not going well for Long in the state legislature, it is alleged he would cut the power supply to the building so that alterations could be made in Long’s favour, under cover of darkness, to the official record of representatives’ votes. After winning a U.S. Senate seat, Long installed his puppet in the governor’s mansion and actually used his old office to direct operations when the Senate was in recess.

Despite his public opposition to the commercial activities of big oil companies, Huey Long and an independent oilman formed a company that obtained leases on state-owned land and then secretly subleased the mineral rights to – you guessed it – the major oil companies. He also authorised a plain clothes police force answerable only to him. Little wonder that an armed insurrection backed by two former state governors reared its head in January 1935 – Long’s response was to declare martial law, ban gatherings of more than one person(!) and outlaw criticism of state officials. Eight months later he was shot dead by the son of a judge who had been gerrymandered out of his job after coming out against Long when he was governor.

Huey Long was a complex and rather inconsistent man. There were a few things to admire about his political legacy. He opposed unemployment and welfare payments. He slashed property taxes, and repealed the poll tax. He proposed making the first million dollars of income (1930s dollars, remember) tax-free. The first five million dollars of income would have only attracted $150,000 in tax – makes the Libertarianz Party’s ‘First $50k tax-free’ pledge in the 2008 election campaign seem a bit wimpish, doesn’t it! And he opposed the Federal Reserve Bank on the quite legitimate grounds that it exercised monopoly powers over the monetary system for the benefit of a few private stockholders.

But the very occasional bright spots in Huey Long’s political career were eclipsed by the monstrous erosions in civil liberties and corruption that were a hallmark of his tenure in office, and his support for statism on a massive scale. He opposed Franklin Roosevelt after initially supporting his rise to the presidency, on the grounds that the New Deal did not go far enough and was a sellout to Big Business(!). Yet Long denied that his political programme was socialistic, declared his inspiration came not from Karl Marx but from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and saw his policies as a bulwark against communism. Roosevelt, in turn, regarded Long as a political threat (rightly so, as Long planned to oust Roosevelt by running against him in 1936 and splitting the Democrat vote), and had him investigated by America’s legalized bloodsuckers, the Daywalkers known as the Internal Revenue Service. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

Barack Obama’s background has been extensively researched by investigators such as Trevor Loudon. His dealings in the past with extremist organizations such as the Weather Underground, and with various fronts for Marxist communism, are now a matter of public record. Obama has said and done very little to dispel fears that the political barometer United States will shortly undergo a violent shift to the left, with inevitable economic destitution and equal poverty for all. Like Huey Long, Obama is a charismatic demagogue with plans to seize the assets of the haves and hand them to the have-nots, notwithstanding the Bill of Rights and other constitutional measures which the founding fathers of America set up to protect individuals from this sort of predation by their own government.

The next U.S. president has been described as the most “loyal Democrat” by one source, and “most liberal” Senator by another. Scary stuff. I foresee hard times ahead for the vast majority of Americans, even those Obama claims he wants to help. How long will it take before the benign smiling face of Obama becomes tense and drawn, when his policies fail to deliver prosperity to Americans? How soon will “change you can believe in” become “change you will accept – or else”?

Slipper – Michael Newberry

Slipper is one of my favourites by artist Michael Newberry, who like all great literary and visual artists has the ability to conceive and create scenes of total originality that – just like the great myths and legends that had the dramatic power to last thousands of years in the retelling -- once seen (or read) the world is inconceivable without them. In the simplest terms, such artists (and such myths) portray great and original scenes that so perfectly animate their theme the world was almost waiting for the artist to create them.

Newberry does this with his Icarus Landing – the figure that conquers the fall of both Christ and Icarus, and puts man back in charge over his universe. He does it again with Artemis. And he does it too with Slipper, whose exuberance burst sout like a bullet in flight heading straight for the furthest horizon.

Why have I chosen it for my first artistic post of the year? Because it encapsulates the sense of life I like to express in my architecture. The exuberance. The light. The feeling of release. The movement. The exaltation. It’s not an expression of repose I aim for in my work (which is what all the textbooks tell us we should aim for in our architecture – creating a sense of repose and then letting our buildings sink down into a sea of subdued magnolias, or pongas), it’s the controlled explosion of joy Newberry captures so perfectly here, and that’s so desperately hard to do well.

A new study has found you shouldn’t believe every “new study”

How many times has that phrase kicked off a new scare story you read over your corn flakes? Here’s a random selection of the sort of pseudo-academic bullshit you might have read recently:

“A new study has found girls targeted by bullies at primary school are 212 times more likely than boys to remain victims as they get older."

"A new study has found that women have better sex with wealthy blokes. "

"A new study has found people who sleep less than seven hours a night appear to be almost three times as likely to catch a cold as those who sleep eight hours or more."

"A new study has found that men who were programmed in the womb to be the most responsive to testosterone tend to be the most successful financial traders. "

“A new study has found women with higher levels of oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, not only look and feel more attractive, they are also more likely to cheat on their partners."

"A new study has found Leonardo Di Caprio’s film performance causes cancer in rats."

Yes, grown adults (biologically at least) spend their time and valuable research dollars “studying” this bullshit. But now a new study says that you shouldn't believe every "new study" that comes out.

The new study started with an old study that came out last April. British researchers got international publicity when they said they'd found that pregnant women who eat a lot of cereal were more likely to have a boy. The new study took a look at the old study and found that it was faulty. "In statistical terms, it's a false positive," said Stanley Young, co-author of the paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Young's team had several reasons to question the results of the cereal-eating study, but one of their major concerns was that the researchers asked too many questions of their participants. "Put enough variables into a study and meaningless statistical flukes can arise," Young added. "The sad thing is what tends to get headlines is the most dramatic or the scarier findings," said CBS4 Denver Medical Editor Dr. Dave Hnida.

The problem is not just too many questions, but too little understanding. Too often, researchers are mistaking correlation for causality. Where real knowledge uncovers and and explains causal connections, pseudo-knowledge simply discovers accidental coincidences and leaps to unproven conclusions .

Consequently, the “studies” you read over your breakfast cereal are likely to make you less, rather them more knowledgeable. And that’s a fact.

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Popular NOT PC so far this year
Peter, just FYI - someone is selling VCR tapes of the complete Ring Cycle on TradeMe (no, not me). The auction no is 199354756.
Beer O’Clock: Behold, the widget!
That is an incredible find, I'll have to give it a go as soon as possible ;)
Hurry back Stu and Neil. He's fair losing the plot... ;)
At last an "ode to my favourite" beer.

All hail the rocket widget!

Even a bad Guinness is shit loads better that any local excuse for a beer.

Lawrence oO
Interesting, comments.

The head brewer from Ireland was in Christchurch last year and was on talk-back radio.

I remember someone rang-in and asked “Can you tell between the N.Z Guinness and the original?” (words to the effect)

His reply was along the lines “Those with trained taste-buds will, but most people won’t”

Take from this, what you will.

Agree, that widget thingy is a marvel of modern science and deserving of a Noble prize.

Cheers.

Paul

PS: A four pack of the cans cost me around $20.00 at the local Wollies on the weekend, so $15 is a good score.
Bush: Five out of ten.
I think he's still bound to go down in history as America's worst president whether it's warranted or not. People criticize Obama as being all style and no substance, but George W Bush had neither, AND came across as a confused halfwit nearly every time he opened his mouth to speak.
I'll give George Bush 9 out of 10 mainly for pursuing terrorists around the world.
I would've expected something like a 2/10 for spraying taxpayer money all over the place, massive debts, crushing civil liberties etc...care to explain the 5/10?
America's worst president - Ha!

What about Pierce and Buchanan? And for that matter Polk, Taylor, Fillmore before them? Five men who let the issue of slavery fester until it provided the spark (with a little help from John Brown) that ignited the US Civil War?

Anyone who calls Bush the worst president in history (a history that stretches back over more than TWO centuries) should be branded as a jackass and run out of town on a rail.
If you don't already subscribe, the NPR intelligence squared podcast is worth a listen.

http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510184

Recently debated: Is Bush The Worst President Of The Past 50 Years?
It depends of course what you think is most important. I think G.W.'s place will depend on the outcome in the Middle East. If let's say 100 years from now democracy flourishes there, his place on the list wouldn't be that low.

If not, he only can depend on keeping America safe, which is quite as shared honour.

I'm not sure he has that many legislative accomplishments. The only changes, as far as I'm aware, were socialist. He didn't run as a conservative I know, but still, disappointing.

His last year was a disaster of course. We can start with his reception of the pope, which was a disgrace to everyone knowing the history of popery and its claims on worldy power that are very similar to what Mohammed and his followers crave.

His handling of the economy, I know, he warned about many issues, was disastrous. For a really funny take on that, watch this.

But as every economist agrees with his approach, should we fault him for agreeing with them and for not having the right instincts and insight?

But that's the hallmark of a great leader isn't it? So I give him a 6.
Bush kept 'merica safe! Safe from what exactly? Next thing some of you will be justifying his presidency on the basis that, yes indeed, the Japanese didn't attack Pearl Harbour again- not on his watch. Bush was on to those nasty little nips! No more surprise attacks from them.

---

A pack of statist minions striding about the media, trying to bullshit some good out of the clusterfuck the Bush regime contributed to, would be comedic if so many people didn't take it seriously enough to believe in it.

Tell the truth! His watch was a collectivist ruination. His actions (or those he presided over) did more to damage the USA and act in opposition to its founding values than Osama #1. All that remains to be seen now is whether Osama #2 does worse.

LGM
FAQ: Can fiscal stimulus save us?
You won't have seen Mr English's piece in today's DomPost in which he says National's stimulus package - at $9 billion - is the 5th most "stimulatory" in the OECD. How can a package be accurately called stimulatory with no knowledge of the outcome? Intent is not enough. When manufacturers make claims about what a product is intended to do, and the product fails to fulfil that promise, they are liable. If only we could hold governments to the standards they require from the private sector.
"Because the fundamental problem is not lack of money to shore up demand, but lack of goods to pay for real demand –- that is, lack of the sort of goods that are being demanded -- and no amount of “stimulus” can fix that. All it can do is make the production of those goods more difficult."

So we can never have a situation of unemployed resources where prices are unable or unwilling to more to clear the market?

Say if wages are stuck too high, firms will hire less than the socially optimal number of workers. Now if this labour input is not used, its just wasted.

If the government was able to use this input to create things of value (eg public goods, or goods that are currently being underprovided given sticky prices) then they are improving societies set of resources - they are using a labour input that would not have been used otherwise. That is productive capacity.

I think the idea of government stimulus can be, and is, massively oversold - but there are certain times when "government" stimulus makes sense.
According to Bernard Hickey, at roughly 3% of GDP, NZ’s stimulus package puts us third most profligate in the world’s “stimulus” stakes, right behind Iceland and Denmark.

Good news, huh.

If only politicians would give some thought to the production side of the equation - they might then consider that what businesses need to produce profitably is for prices to fall, and they sure as hell aren't going to do that while all that printed money is inflating the hell out of demand.

And you surely know, Lindsay, that governments are never judged on their actual results, only on their promises.

To them, spending is the result.
Hang on. Are't there too many goods, rather than too few?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/gallery/2009/jan/16/unsold-cars?picture=341883529
MATT: Sorry, the simple and unpalatable truth that you and your confreres need to grasp is that if wages are stuck too high, and they are, then wages need to fall. And they will have to.

It doesn't take a PhD in economics (or a re-reading of Herbert Hoover's destructive efforts to fake reality) to understand that as long as wages are set too high then unemployment is the inevitable result, but as long as all the PhDs make excuses for why they can't fall or don't need to fall then wage-earners themselves will fail to heed the message, and politicians who promise the delusion of a stimulatory (read inflationary) path out of the economic wilderness will continue to get their support instead of their approbation.

And don't tell me that wage and salary-earners won't allow their wages and salaries to drop. When the case is put to them rationally, the evidence of at least one workplace shows that they do.
Anonymous: Too many of the wrong sort of goods -- i.e., too many goods were produced in the boom that in boom conditions producers thought would be productive, but by the time they were produced it became clear the market didn't want them.

Too many goods into which too much real capital was thrown in times of too low interest rates, and which we now have to earn back.
PC,

Yeah, I get your point. But you have to admit, they are pretty cool photos!
Hi PC,

Thats the thing - I agree that if wages are too high they need to fall. But if, for some reason, they don't fall then the government may be able to get these people to produce something of value.

Of course, I would like it if the government could quantify what this value is - and show that they aren't also nicking off with resources from the private sector when doing it. However, it is still a plausible situation.

Note, I am saying that wages are stuck high - for some reason they just won't fall. I am not saying that I think we should hold up wages or anything of the such. Now if it turns out that wages don't get stuck we wouldn't need to look at intervention.

"And don't tell me that wage and salary-earners won't allow their wages and salaries to drop"

This is a question that economists have studied in detail. Think of it this way - the majority of people in the firm would rather have someone else sacked then take a paycut, so in order to keep up morale etc the firm is more likely to sack staff instead of cutting wages.

In this case the relationship between the employee and employer can hold up wages even in the face of rising unemployment and falling general prices.

I agree that this is an essential assumption - and if you don't agree with it then I can completely understand why you would be 100% against intervention. However, I do believe it - so I think the case can be made for intervention in "some" circumstances. Whether we should be doing it now is a whole other question ;)
Hi Matt,

No, I don't agree it's a necessary assumption, as my example of the enlightened workplace shows.

So first of all, I do disagree that it's an essential assumption (as Mr Keynes was so wont to insist).

I'd suggest that reactions to any suggestions that wages must drop are predicated very much so, as all human behaviour is, by the context in which that need is explained.

If it's made in the context I suggest in that example, a context that would be made easier by widespread publicity from more rational economists that such cuts really are essential, then yes, I would expect many workplaces to do so -- with the result that production could be maintained but at the lower cost needed to meet the market.

But if it's made in a different context -- one for example in which both politicians and the less rational economists are suggesting there's some way for everone to get something for nothing -- then I'd expect more of them to vote to eat their cake and have it too. And why wouldn't they, since they've been told so thoroughly by those who should know better that such a thing is possible.

But second of all, even on your own terms, there's no way that the government stimulus can get people to produce something of value that they wouldn't produce otherwise.

As Robert Barro argues (via Paul Walker), any "multiplier" created by any such stimulus is certainly going to be less than 1.0, and probably closer to zero than it is to anything else.

Government spending really is no free lunch.
Barackistas’ bilge
I wondered by how much they raised the temperature of the planet. Hope they all planted a tree on the way home.
'60s juveniles have returned to power, both as officials and cheerleaders.

Rhetoric suddenly has the magic power to solve problems.
How do Obamafiles think they’re going to save the planet, fix the economy, or even sort out their own damn neighbourhoods, when they can’t even clean up after themselves.

******

By getting underpaid Mexicans to clean up?
How utterly lame Peter, to post on rubbish left behind after a historic occasion.

You know, several people have commented to me on how your sense of life and has just disappeared.

What a malevolent view of the human spirit you show these days.

Don't forget it's only socialism when Obama does it, eh.
Yes, Ruth, it was certainly foolish of Ayn Rand to write about the rubbish left behind after Woodstock, wasn't it, and compare it to the aftermath of the Apollo 11 Launch of the same year , wasn't it.

"...several people blah, blah, blah ..."

Would these be the ones to whom you were comparing me to Kyle Chapman? And you have the audacity to talk of malevolence in others! Sheesh already.
Again, it is the hatred of the good for being good - to quote Rand back at you.

Obama is a good man - and he has already made many changes which honor the constitution which Rand would have been pleased with.

What would Rand have said about torture, warrantless eavesdropping, detention without trial and so on that most of your swooning fans seem to support?

Correlating Obama (and probably the hated Key) with Woodstock is totally wrong. Even Perigo, to his credit, is starting to realise this.

When facts prove you incorrect, the classical liberal position is to revise your opinion.

No one sees that from you. You seem to have an adamantine skull.
"Obama is a good man - and he has already made many changes which honor the constitution.."

Honour? Hardly! His stated intention is to "revise" the Constitution. He does not honour it. Hell! he even had trouble taking the oath of the presidency. Freudian slip....

LGM
Even the Obamessiah can’t kill old hatreds
The Arabs are Semites, too, so the anti-Semitism isn't that which is perpetuated by the Arabs, it's the Europeans who didn't want the Jews after WWII in their countries and now don't want the Palestinians or the Gitmo refugees, either to enter their borders.

My questions is, why did supposedly intelligent people let this go on so long, citing religious reasons and differences and the coming of the anti-Christ blur the fact that Jews and Arabs lived peacefully in Palestine before the interference by the Europeans. Didn't it occur to Disraeli or anyone that maybe a little thing known as payment for the land would help smooth the way for the Jews? I know they hoped that the Arabs would finish the job that Hitler started, but here is where America came in. Too many of us knew Jews personally and identified with their struggle, so no more genocide was going to occur under our watch.

When it became apparent that the different prime ministers of Israel were taking different approaches to the Palestinian problem, counting on US aid and arms but not aiding the people whose land they took over, those of us who identified with the Jews withdrew our approval and then were tagged "anti-Semitic" whenever one even breathed opposition to any Israeli policy.

Now, it seems too late to help the situation. Every time the presidents leave office, Israel gets the chance to kill a few thousand Palestinian people, citing Palestinans or Hamas who have homemade rockets with limited range-- Not as many as Rwanda or the Congo, but enough to keep things interesting or the next four years of a presidential term. I barely remember Sharon, but I remember his baggage he left behind. This from someone who never liked politics.

All I can do is pray as the Book says, for the health of Israel. That includes the Palestinians. And the souls of the Israelis who are adopting the tactics of people who held them in captivity 60 years ago. Pray for us now and at the our of our death. Amen.
None of us refer to Obama as the Obamessiah, and, if you would kindly discontinue your generalizations against his supporters, you would realize that the plurality of us are cautiously optimistic.

I'm assuming you're either a right-leaning moderate or a conservative, which explains your word usage. You crave the sight of Democrats genuflecting at the altar of Obama. Too bad quite a bit of us are willing to break from the pack if deemed necessary.
What I like is how 'Anonymous' asks PC to stop his generalisations then he generally assumes PC is a conservative or 'right leaning'. The only difference is PC doesn't know who 'Anonymous' is thus can't check his blog out to figure out his political/philosophical stance, where 'Anonymous' has this access when it comes to PC but still made a false generalisation.
Anonymous is just your banal religious racist. He's a collectivist (note the use of terms such as "our", "us", etc.). He seems to think his soft headed mush gains a validity if he can pretend that he is representing many other people. What a fool.

LGM
Translating from the overblown
Book-length baloney from a flat-out fool
"Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend—the political equivalent of the pet rock?"

Pretty unlikely, given Obama's picks for Sec. of DOE, EPA, etc. Right after he's done signing the $825 billion dollar boondoggle, look for Green issues to get much more press as Cap and Trade or Carbon Tax debates take center stage.

Progressives have gotten a whole new political lease on life, in order to destroy it, and they are just getting warmed up.
Read the dark side of energy saving light bulbs. This has many stories in one.

See http://www.phillyfuture.org/node/5298 and http://www.phillyfuture.org/node/5297About 90 percent of the energy saving light bulbs are made in China in "dirty" manufacturing processes with mercury out in the open. When finished it becomes an 8000 mile light bulb - it takes 8000 miles of long haul shipping and packaging to get to the USA.

Before talking green, Thomas Friedman and President Obama should calculate what Free Trade has cost the environment. A new software company in the USA has a program that calculates these costs for long haul shipping in the USA - just think what the cost would be globally.

President Obama should also explain what happens after all the new green products get off the ground. If it is like the high technology industry, the production phase goes outside the USA to places like China where the energy saving light bulb is made.

There are no walls in the sky to partition off pollution.

See http://tapsearch.com/flatworld
NOT PJ: Smoke and MRIs
I make alternative warnings for my old man to slip under the plastic on his cigarette packets - a picture of a sexy chick in a bikini with warnings like "CAUTION: smoking makes you so sexy you'll score babes like this and possibly knock them up." or "WARNING: Smoking improves my size - stand back, I'm not sure how big it's gunna get."

Yes, it's petty and infantile.
Its a proven assertion that smoking causes statistics. But that aside, I have long felt that journalism these days would appear to be little more that "cutting & pasting" press releases without any thought.
It is a violation of property rights when the state commands tobacco companies to put warnings on the packets, i.e. the packets are the property of the tobacco companies and the state has no right to tell the companies what to do with their property.

I've specifically asked smokers about those pictures and they say that they know smoking is bad for them but they carry on regardless.

Another thing that the nanny state bleats about is drink-driving.

I recently analysed how much state propaganda was in a NZ Herald article on drink-driving; one could be forgiven for thinking that the NZH is a state organ:

I usually consumed about a 6 pack heineken, before driving up from Whangaporoa to Auckland at some weekends to watch a game of rugby either super-14 or NPC during the season. I always stayed on & party in the city before heading home at 1 am or later, really wasted, but hey I am a good driver when I am drunk especially when I have consumed about 20 bottles by the time I am making my way home.

Hey Kiwipole, if you want to prove your point about legalizing drink driving, then perhaps you can come for a ride to Whangaporoa with me when I come up to the city for a super-14 game, next month (Feb). We can party after the game till dawn and you can witness how responsible my driving is, when I take you for a ride on the northern motorway into whangaporoa.

What do you think?
kiwipolemicist said... As a classical liberalist I believe that drink-driving should be legalised

A brilliant example of idealism and common sense parting company. Your belief is ridiculous in the extreme.

It's akin to me stating I should be able to go about firing a machine gun, aiming a couple of inches about people's heads, simply because I'm a really good shot and am not causing any injury until I hit someone. Yours is a view foolish beyond words.
Kurt: a response to your comment can be found here:

Marcus: the whole point is that people should wear the consequences of their actions if, as a result of choosing to do something stupid like drink-driving or aiming two inches above someone's head, they harm the person or property of someone else.

It's all about personal responsibility for actions, rather than having the state deciding which activities are or are not permissible.

As I said in the post linked to above, legalisation does not equal condonation, except to those proles who are used to the state dictating their actions.
Kiwipolemicist, I constantly bemoan the lack of personal responsibility in society these days, but this is not ALL about personal responsibility for actions at all - it's also about the likelihood of an action to cause harm, and preventing harm before it occurs.

What you're not acknowledging is that there are TWO sets of rights in this situation... the right that Person A has to drive drunk as long as he doesn't cause harm, opposing the right that Person B has to not be killed by a drunk driver.

Technically, I guess, this will always mean the state will be trampling on somebody's rights. So whose rights are going to be defended? It sure as as hell shouldnt' be the drunk driver, who has made the personal decision to act in a way that could lead to serious harm, if not death.

As I intimated before - idealism and common sense aren't always good bedmates.
I am going to have to agree with Marcus here, the trick about it is whose right takes ascendancy when two peoples rights collide.

My right to live, and your right to drink and drive.

Yes personal responsibility is important and should be emphasized more, but my (and any other person's) right to live (which underpins such ideas as thou shalt not murder) should not be able to be overcome in any circumstance.

Similar arguements can also be made along these lines for speeding (our roads are not autobahns and have not been designed for driving at high speeds) and smoking in public (although I personally think that businesses, such as the Cigar Bar, should have been able to apply for exemptions to that)
I don't intend to directly join the conversation on drink-driving, except to observe that if you find that two people's rights are (apparently) in opposition, then you will find that you have incorrectly defined the rights in that situation.
Bernard Shwartz House – Frank Lloyd Wright [updated]
Thanks for posting that - I love FLW's work, despite knowing bugger all about architecture.
If you love FLW's work, then you clearly know a good deal about architecture. :-)
This will sound so naff it's not funny, but his work is the kind of thing that doesn't merely exist, it has a voice - especially Falling Water.
And this will probably sound like I'm just sucking up ... but I know exactly what you mean.
Two sentences that sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflictThe Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land....

And how'd the Israelis get the land in the first place, hmm?
NEW BLOG: Heroes of Capitalism
Nice, but unless business success really gets your juices flowing, that's going to get a bit ho-hum after a while. Perhaps you could do a weekly one?

Wonder if the guy(s) who founded kiva.org will ever make to that site...
Check out the Podcast on the right hand side. Should be good for the Ipod if they put out regular episodes.
Rhetoric, hope, hysteria … [updated]
"Are you buying?"Nope. The direction Obama points to is demonstrated perfectly by the EUSSR.I never cared much about the particular pigmentation of socialists--I loathe them all equally.
A president who has read both of Smith's books, it can't be all bad. But I do doubt that he has leant anything from them. His views on trade, for example, don't seem very Smith like to me.
Obama may have mentioned "un-believers" but that term and the way he used it made it pretty clear that atheists are about as welcome as a turd floating in the White House swimming pool. It's akin to the use of the derogatory term "climate changer deniers" for people who are stubborn enough to ask for a sliver of evidence before reversing 200 years of economic growth.
Obama, like his Progressive supporters, often sounds like nothing so much as Mussolini with a gentler tone of voice and gesture. Just as Goldberg describes in Liberal Fascism...
Three thoughts regarding Obama:

1) today the commies won the cold war without firing a shot

2) are any US veterans of Korea and Vietnam ticked off about a communist being the president?

3) It is deeply ironic that the Bush dynasty, which created the crisis of terrorism to replace the crisis of communism in order to destroy personal freedoms, has been succeeded by someone who is a communist and a terrorist.

Stay tuned ...
I thought I'd be woken this morning by the choirs of angels, but somehow I slept right through it...
Didn't you see the star that appeared in the West about 5:30am?
Anon - Bush had much to do with the current financial crisis. He failed to abolish the Federal Reserve, he allowed the printing of counterfeit money and permitted fractional (fraudlent) reserve banking by private institutions. He left the country in debt to its eyeballs and the Patriot Act and other legislation has greatly impaired the freedom of Americans. I don't rate him terribly highly at all. On the plus side, there have been no further serious terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11.
"On the plus side, there have been no further serious terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11."

Yeah. And the Japanese haven't attacked Pearl Harbour again either.

LGM
PC: “Didn't you see the star that appeared in the West about 5:30am?”

You too, PC? Now that’s spooky.

May I offer a personal testimony? Some weeks ago, I was driving home in the late afternoon with my significant other, when a voice on the radio spoke to those “huddled around radios”.

My spine, nay, my entire body tingled, while my significant other reported a quiver in her inner thigh, which took me aback somewhat, but I guess the Spirit goeth where it willeth. We gazed at each other in wonder. How did He know that at that very moment we would be fulfilling His Words?

Since that day I have pondered on this -- dare I say spiritual? -- experience, but have failed to find a rational explanation. And now, President Obama has offered to be a “friend” of peace-loving peoples around the world. He wants to be my friend! I cannot but accept with boundless gratitude.

The good news, PC, is that Obama wants to be your friend too. All you need do is open your heart and ask Him to enter. He will not refuse. The rewards are great. You will cease fretting about “malinvestments” and “business cycles” and bask in the warmth of the Obama brotherhood. Join us now. You know you want to.
Ideas You Need to Know #27: Marginal Utility
History Through Art
History through really bad Art.
The way Bill Bryson tells it Lincoln thought the Gettysburg address was a miserable failure at the time. He followed someone who spoke more in the mode that was current at the time, with terrifyingly florid classical references at interminable length.

Apparently Lincoln didn't give any campaign speeches in the 1860 election so presently I'm not sure what the grounds of comparison would be.
Lincoln was a murderous swine. He was directly responsible for the mysery, rape and death of many of his own countrymen. In comparison with Obama hae had two features in common- he was a non-productive parasite (a failure) and he could talk nice words.

The best thing that can be said about him was that he ended his days in mortal agony.

LGM
LGM, don't believe everything you read in DiLorenzo's book.

In my judgement, Lincoln was neither ogre nor hero. I'm with Tibor Machan> in considering him to be mixed -- but it would be incorrect to call him a murderous swine who was directly responsible for the misery, rape and death of many of his own countrymen.

Lay that at the feet of the slave-owners and secessionists. As Tibor argues, "when one considers that the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way were, in effect, kidnapping millions of people -- most of whom would rather have stayed with the union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation -- the idea of secession no longer seems so innocent. And regardless of Lincoln's motives -- however tyrannical his aspirations or ambitious -- when slavery is factored in, it is doubtful that one can justify secession by the southern states."

Tibor concludes that "however flawed Lincoln was, he was a good American." FWIW, I agree with him.
Paul, in this context the best art is that which most clearly demonstrates the historical context, no?
Kids deserve better art than turgid 19th Century costume dramas. Besides, the purpose of teaching History is not to promote legends of great men doing noble deeds. History is far more complex and far less ideological than that.
LGM said "The best thing that can be said about him was that he ended his days in mortal agony"

It's a pity LGM's daddy didn't pull out of his mummy and blog would-be LGM all over the blankets.
PC

Putting aside that Lincoln was of the big tax, big govt, mercantilist persuasion, he indeed had an important choice to make. Did he allow a war to start- one which he knew would result in mass destruction, the maiming, the difugurement, the disablement and deaths of scores of his fellow citizen Americans or did he choose to avoid it?

Would YOU make the decision to take your fellows into such a war given similar circumstances (the right to tax)?

The historical record demonstrates exactly what Lincoln was, what he allowed and what he did. The USA has sufferred for it subsequently. It is a small measure of justice that he died as he did.

LGM
Anonymous

It's a pity your mother flushed the baby and kept the pooh. Ah well, she was lonely and couldn't remember which rodent had fertilised her anyway.

LGM
The "choice" about war did not lie with Lincoln. It lay chiefly on those who sought secession to maintain their ownership of slaves.

Just as I say above, and as Tibor argues.
LG, a former flatmate of mine in San Francisco (whom I discovered to be a libertarian years later!) is dubious of Lincoln, too. Several years ago he sent me a published essay (not his) whereby the author was very critical of AL for the protectionist reasons you note.

The essay's essence was that the Civil War was economically-driven, with abolition being the necessary excuse. That while the North was clamping down fiscally (& going backwards as a result), the South was organising its own export arrangements & flourishing, etc. And as such, the North was not happy with the power imbalance.

The author was not defending slavery in any manner, noting that the abhorrent practice would eventually have been abolished .. because that's just what happens as people evolve. (Think small boys up chimneys, etc).

As we know, the Unionists razed the south in the end. Absolutely destroyed it. And the cruel irony was that blacks were still treated very poorly, not receiving the vote for another century.

I backpacked through the south 20+ yrs ago. (Trotted over the field at little Gettysburg, too, while in PA). Old habits die hard down there. A chap in Charleston told me that kids don't know that 'damn yankee' is two words until they learn to read ...
PC

Lincoln was president. He was the leader of the Federal Government of the USA. The choice about whether to enter a violent war or seek an alternative resolution to the situation resided with Lincoln, the President. He WAS the president; the authority in power. He was in possession of solid advice about the policies he was about to pursue. He decided which path to take. His decision shaped the results and determined the consequences. Worse, his on-going decisions determined the nature of that horrible war- from sea to shining sea, while we were marching through Georgia etc. etc. etc.

BTW he was not concerning himself about the plight of the slaves in the Southern states when he chose warfare over other alternatives. The proclamation of emancipation occurred AFTER the blood letting on both sides was so severe that Lincoln sought ANYTHING, ANYTHING AT ALL he could find to damage the Southern ability to continue to fight.

But the damning decision remains that first step- the one where he decided to commit Americans to fight, to rape, to injure, to pillage, to rob, to steal, to destroy... THAT and a hugely inflated Federal power is his legacy.

LGM
The choice you describe did not exist.

After decades of "alternative resolutions" to the problem that was put off by the founders -- from acceptance of slavery to the Missouri Compromise to the Dred Scott decision to the new slave states potentially admitted to the Union that would have tipped the balance in favour of slavery -- the keg was already lit, and the choice you claim was open to Lincoln was no longer possible.

The situation had already exploded under him.

I stand behind what I quoted from Tibor above, and what he wrote in the two links he posted.
PC

Lincoln's decision to enter a war was determined for mercantilist and tax reasons. He was NOT making his decision according to a concern about the plight of the slaves. It is doubtful he would have given them much thought whatsoever AT THE TIME. They were certainly NOT the driver of his decision.

Once the Southern States vacated the Union (a constitional mechanism existed for them to do this), that should have been the end of the matter. President Lincoln did not have a right to start a war to build supreme authority for Federal Government. The Federation of States was over at that point. Lincoln acted to prevent that situation from becoming established as a permanent state of affairs and also to prevent the economic difficulties the secession would have provided for the North (and his backers).

The decision he faced: do I send my fellow citizens into a war, to rape, pillage, injure, destroy, steal and kill etc. or not?

Later decisions he made determining the prosecution of that war are even more damning.

BTW the President does indeed have the power to make the decision about whether or not to enter a war. That's a wee small part of his powers and responsibilities.

LGM
LGM, yes, he was a mercantilist. Yes, Mercantilism was one of the drivers of the differences between North and South.

But pointing to that as the primary cause of the war is just flat wrong. Suggesting Lincoln could have avoided war is just not right. Suggesting the South had a moral right to secede, "in effect, kidnapping millions of people -- most of whom would rather have stayed with the union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation," is just flat wrong.

May I suggest once again that you deal with the issues raised in Tibor's two posts.
PC

What I wrote was that Lincoln (the individual) had a choice. His reasons for his decision were not based on a concern for the plight of the slaves in the South. They were based on other priorities.

The assertion that it is "just not right" that Lincoln could have avoided his war remains merely assertion. Suffice to say, a single simple act, such as withdrawal from Sumter, rather than a provocative resupply, would have been one modest step toward negotiation and avoidance of serious violence. It was one opportunity that was lost (among others). It was squandered for deliberate calculated reason.

A suggestion that the Southern States were "kidnapping millions of people" is quite as obscene as the idea that the North would "liberate" millions of people by the acts of conscription, torturing, raping, burning, looting murdering, destroying, maiming, stealing etc. Did the North "own" these people? Perhaps it is best remembered that it is best policy to avoid arguing history according to collectivist premise...

In the final analysis, Lincoln had a vital choice to make. He exercised it. Note that he didn't make just that one choice either. He made a consistent series. The prosecution of that terrible civil war was fought according to a standard of conduct with Lincoln's full and specific knowledge and worse, to his instruction. That is a matter of historical fact. The papers, letters etc. still exist.

Lincoln's contributions to the USA remain the enablement of a powerful centralised Federal government (which the founders and framers of the Constitution greatly feared and had taken some efforts to attempt to avoid), the dilution of a great Constitution and a horrific civil war (culminating in the destruction of the Southern States). He paved the route for a new direction away from Republic and toward Empire.

Was he all evil? Don't know. His wife liked him, as did others. She was said to have been nice. Was he a power lusting politician who had failed in private business.......?

BTW an interesting aside to the American Civil War is that the Imperoial German Army sent several observers to learn about the prosecution of the civil war first hand. Some are said to have actually taken part in the action, while others observed. The most ambitious group were most interested in the potential for mobilising industry for what later came to be known as total warfare. They spent much time and effort examining that aspect. The idea of full civilian involvement seemed to be an appealing development in more ways than one and the Germans soon got over their squeamishness. Several books were written summarising their findings and recommendations. Rather than wading through the turgidity of that you can find a brief summary in Hunt Tooley's account of WW1.

LGM

PS can anyone name the most famous German military officer who visted the USA during the Civil War? He was introduced to a device that later defined his life and his life's work.
LGM said "It's a pity your mother flushed the baby and kept the pooh"

What is it with you and poo? Is it because you are annoyed that you have to keep dry-cleaning Perigo's poo off your curtains [after he's withdrawn from your arse]. Suck it clean for him - you crawling lowlife, you know you want to.

Keep up with the collective agreement on the most puritanical Libertine position, you totalitarian nutbar. LOL
LGM said"What I wrote was that Lincoln (the individual) had a choice. His reasons for his decision were not based on a concern for the plight of the slaves in the South. They were based on other priorities"

LGM. How dare you offer a "non-approved" Libertine viewpoint of Lincoln to that of Lord High Priest Cresswell.

Shame on you, you are obviously displaying clear signs that you lack the required ideological purity to conform to the Libertarian collective !

Thought it was you. It is so easy to flush you out (all one needs recall about you is your unhealthy fixation with the potty and your botty).

===

PC and I can debate this subject because we are both aware of the history, the ideas at issue and the results of what occurred. Each has invested the time to read the relevant material and consider it in detail. Our debate is really one regarding context- not that you'd have a clue.

Contrasting with your own situation- no specific knowledge, no reading, no thinking, no background research, nothing but emotive outbursts related to that unhealthty fixation of yours. Time to get your head out of the toilet, dry your hair and get the professional help you so clearly need.

LGM
Stimulunatics
"Wouldn’t we be better of if governments foreswore all the “stimulus” packages, and the deficit spending used to finance them, and instead got the hell out of the say [sic] so markets can correct?"

Brother, from your lips to the RNC chairman's ear... because Republicans still don't get it! Until or unless they do, or we get a viable 3rd party that does, we're in deep dung, because the Democrats passed the point of no return 40 years ago.
Perfect cartoon, by the way. Great find.
At the moment I've even given up the home that some governments will learn from this. I think they might already know perhaps. But they don't care. It's the chance of a life time for socialist to nationalise as much as they can, and inflate themselves out of their debts.

It won't work. But the next generation, if there's one, will try again.
The only government stimulus to the economy I can think of is Seppuku...
Don't worry. When everything fails and the state-worshipping masses begin to realise the heroic state has not been able to enrich them (for free), then a great war will present itself. The leaders will embrace it. The masses will do likewise.

LGM
So, how 'bout splainin' some of those errors Woodhill made? Nothing poked me in the eye on a first reading.
Ugh!
Greatest living New Zealander?
I've always been a fan of Sir Peter Tapsell...hope he's still alive. An orthopaedic surgeon, MP, speaker of the house and man of mana...
Russell Coutts is back. Yeah! He is going to show us why we should put talent before loyalty.
Website polls are notoriously unreliable and prone to hijacking - I believe Winston was elected 'most trusted politician' a few months back when Greens voters got pissed off that Fitzsimmons wasn't included in the poll.

Right on about Douglas though - hands up who'll be going to his state funeral? Apparently there's an NZer out there who was critical in winning the Battle of Britain, but IMHO he really needs to do something after the event in question.
Stephen, you'd be meaning Sir Keith Park, who died in 1975.
Ah nuts.
That army guy Apiata (sp) walked (or ran) up a hill. How does that make him great?

He will appeal to all the swooning right wingers no doubt...;-)
Sir Keith was a gentleman.

I think Graeme Hart is the greatest living NZer.
Peter Creswell, of course!
Louise frickin Nicholas??? I give up. Kill me now.
I meant to say, "Who’s the greatest living NZer in your assessment, apart from ourselves of course?"

I don't want to make the competition for the others too stiff. :-)
Ruth

Thanks for the list. It's interesting who is mentioned and who is absent!

We could get someone really annoyed and say.........Dave Dobbin!

LGM
Of that list, Nancy Wake without a doubt. A true heroine of the French Resistance.

I wonder how many of the respondants knew who she was.
A victory for … [updated]
Justice still not being seen to be done
Anti Dismal more than promised
DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Hail to the Chief!
Slipper – Michael Newberry
Great stuff PC.

BTW Paul Walker is blogging again.
Really?
I usually catch the news every day (in large part for the weather report, but I listen to other stuff too). I've declared a blackout for Jan 20, and maybe the rest of the week.

Frankly, making a gingerbread house from toilet paper rolls would be more important than the ceremony of crowning his royal highness.
We will only know when the week is over.
No way - the most important thing is what is Michelle going to wear!!!
Nah my cousin's birthday is more important. At least I'v met him.
Yes. The very fact that the Clintons have secured a third term is newsworthy.
Like it or not, yes. Son of goat herder becomes first black president of the world's most powerful superpower.
Yes.
Without an iota of doubt. Champagne lunch at work, then drinks at a friends place after, anyways...

DenMT
A new study has found you shouldn’t believe every “new study”
"And that’s a fact."

Really? Do you have a study to prove that? :)
It won't be too long before some academics somewhere, published a study of how long to reach an ejaculation during a wanking session.

I am sure that such study would be very useful.
Most researchers don't actually claim that their studies are definitive. They mostly show that there is a possibly a link, and that further study is warranted.

If you think that's self serving, then you have to wonder about the media who beat up the research into 'fact' and publish the lurid stories - just to scare you into selling more newspapers.
We have these studies because these people are paid with tax dollars. No sane individual or corporation would ever do or publish studies of these kind (except the New Market Business Association).